livingston
20×102mm Vulcan
Environmental catastrophe
Environmental activists and popular media like to portray wind turbines and solar panels as the only salvation for a civilization on the brink of a manmade environmental disaster. But the reality is not so simple: All human activities impact the environment, whether that activity is manufacturing, mining, or even tourism.Unfortunately, “green energy” activists invariably overlook this fact as they argue that wind turbines and solar panels provide an unqualified benefit for the environment.
This article will examine the environmental impact of a Minnesota “Green New Deal,” a hypothetical situation in which our state transitions away from fossil fuels and nuclear energy to a grid powered exclusively by wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries, as proposed by Governor Tim Walz and other Democratic legislators.
Everybody knows that sunlight and windy breezes do not create pollution. However, the technologies that humans build to harvest the energy from wind and solar resources — wind turbines, solar panels and lithium-ion batteries — require the mining of raw material, processing of minerals, manufacturing, construction, and ultimately, tearing them down at the end of their useful lives, and each of these phases has an impact on the environment.
Engineers have trouble predicting how many wind turbines, solar panels and batteries would be needed to have a “Green New Electric Grid” because it’s impossible to know how much electricity these energy sources will generate at any given hour on any given day. Their electricity generation varies with the weather.
During the early summer of 2021, for example, wind turbines produced less than one percent of their potential output for multiple hours due to low wind speeds, even as demand for electricity for air conditioning soared (See Figure 1).
Wind and solar are infinite energy resources, but the metals and minerals used to make wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles are not. This is crucial to understand because a recent study by the International Energy Agency (IEA) found that “renewable” energy sources require far more metal than traditional energy sources.
It would require four percent of the global annual production of copper, 18 percent of global nickel production, and 164 percent of global annual cobalt production to “decarbonize” a single U.S. state (See Figure 2).
These figures are stunning. Further context reveals the full scale of metals needed to convert just one state from fossil fuels to wind, solar, and batteries.
A recent analysis by Goldman Sachs entitled “Copper is the New Oil” concluded that only one million metric tons of the copper were used for “green” purposes, in wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars, in 2020. This means that electrifying the state of Minnesota would account for roughly 71 percent of global “green” copper consumption in 2020. Anyone who thinks this is “sustainable” needs to take a sobering look at the numbers.
Increasing our reliance upon wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and EVs will spur an enormous demand for metals. The amount of environmental destruction that results from this mining will largely depend upon where the mining occurs because different nations have vastly different regulations in place to protect the environment from the impact of mining.
Environmental catastrophe
Why Minnesotans need to understand the costly impacts of Minnesota's Green New Deal.
www.americanexperiment.org